Bill Phillis, leader of the Ohio Equity and Adequacy Coalition, is a dedicated advocate for equitable funding of public schools. He reports here that charter schools–many of which are very low-performing–receive nearly $1 billion a year.

He writes:

Total payment to charter schools is $903,344,671.24 as of the January 2014 report. This is a one-year figure.

You may wish to examine the State Report Card at http://reportcard.education.ohio.gov/Pages/School-Search.aspx. You must enter a charter school name in the search box on the right hand side.

Ohio has spent $1.4 billion on charters that never received a C or higher on the report card and/or scores below the average performance index score for Big 8 Urban buildings.

Initial estimates show that Ohio has spent about $1 billion on charters that have closed for a variety of reasons since the 2002-2003 school year, only 25% of that can be attributed to charters that were forced shut by state law.

As of today on the ODE website, there are 392 charter schools.

As of today on the ODE website, 151 charter schools have closed.

Bill can be reached at ohioeanda@sbcglobal.net

Below is a letter to the editor published in the Akron Beacon Journal by a long-term suburban board of education member.

February 1, 2014 – 10:54 PM

“High cost of choice.”

In response to the Jan. 30 letter “Thanks for the choice,” I’m pleased that the writer’s children “thrive in the home-school environment.”

I firmly believe, however, that most young people would benefit more from interacting with a variety of students, educationally and socially.

“Choice” sounds wonderful, but that depends on who’s paying for it – and there’s no question that our system of truly public schools is footing much of the bill for the largely unproductive charter-school program.

Whether providing instruction online or face-to-face, Ohio’s so-called community schools are seldom operated by members of the local community.

Moreover, these supposedly public schools are distinctly private where finances are concerned. Most are productive only when it comes to profits. Meanwhile, the real public school systems see far too much of their limited resources diverted to a failed and misleading experiment of “choice.”

Richard V. Levin
Fairlawn

Editor’s note: The writer is a 20-year member of the Copley-Fairlawn Board of Education.

The following was sent by Bill Phillis of the Ohio Coalition for Equity and Adequacy:

Denis Smith, a retired public school teacher, administrator and former charter school consultant at the Ohio Department of Education, sent the message below to the editor of The Columbus Dispatch.

January 16, 2014

Denis Smith, a retired public school teacher, administrator and former charter school consultant at the Ohio Department of Education, sent the message below to the editor of The Columbus Dispatch. Since there has been no response from The Dispatch, with Denis’ permission, it is being forwarded. It appears that the media is as oblivious to the charter school scam as state officials in Ohio.

Mr. Marrison:

This message is sent to you and your education reporters on a background basis and with the intent that there will be no attribution to me in the event of any subsequent story development. I hope you accept this important qualification as I provide you the following.

Your coverage of the unrest in Turkey as featured in the December 26 print edition did mention that part of the protests directed at the Turkish government are generated from followers of a Turkish national named Fethullah Gulen. There was no mention that Gulen is an exile who lives in seclusion in Pennsylvania and who directs operations in a number of countries that support his business network.

Let me get right to the point. Do you intend to inform your readers that this same Gulen Movement, with deep ties in the Middle East, has established a network of charter schools around this nation and maintains about 20 affiliated charter schools here in Ohio? I believe that your readers need to know this important connection as we all cover the unfolding developments in Turkey which may end up destabilizing the current government in a volatile part of our world.

The New York Times has provided coverage of Gulen’s involvement in American public education through publicly funded charter schools in a series of articles going back to 2011, mostly written by Stephanie Saul. If you or staff are not fully informed about the Gulen Movement, I provide you this query for some of these links: http://query.nytimes.com/search/sitesearch/#/stephanie+saul+charter+schools

As a retired school administrator and as someone who has monitored the growth of this foreign network for the last six years, I am concerned at the lack of coverage by your newspaper of a foreign organization that has used public funds to set up a chain of 135 charter schools in 25 states, with some of those schools operating here in Ohio.http://charterschoolscandals.blogspot.com/p/gulen-school-characteristics.html

Could it be that your newspaper is so obsessed with beating up the Columbus City Schools over data-rigging that you have chosen to ignore what many of my colleagues feel is an even bigger story, viz., how public funds are supporting an organization which hires Turkish and other foreign nationals over Americans to staff its system of charter schools and where taxpayer funds may be transferred to other countries?

In case you are interested in pursuing this story, here are some questions that a good investigation of these schools might raise as you might work to tell this story in the public interest.

1. As the auditor’s office or the AG might say, what is the proper public purpose in allowing a foreign-based organization to use public funds to establish a chain of charter schools in this country, knowing that they are exempt from about 200 sections of the Ohio Revised Code?

2. Is there an insufficient pool of trained and qualified American administrative and teaching staff that can justify the importation of charter school staff through one-year visas, knowing that these individuals will be paid with public funds? Obviously, this program would involve the U. S. Department of State. Previous investigative work has been done in this area, but it is dated by several years and needs to be reexamined.

3. Charter schools are supposedly public schools. If that is the case, why do the governing board members of these schools appear to be mostly male? (At least they were several years ago, when I had the opportunity to observe this state of affairs.) Do the parents of children enrolled in Gulen-affiliated schools even know the identity of these individuals or how to contact them? Are board meetings publicized and accessible to the parents of the schools? Do all-male boards containing some foreign-born individuals truly represent the public interest?

4. How are these governing board members chosen? Are they hand-picked for their allegiance to Gulen and his beliefs? With such a uniform profile, how can these board members represent the students, parents, and the larger community?

5. Is there a requirement that these board members need to be American citizens, knowing that some of the teachers in the schools are in this country on the basis of one-year visas? Has anyone, including the Ohio Department of Education and the school authorizers, examined the reason for a large number of foreign-born individuals on the boards of these schools?

If schools were like shoe stores, they would open wherever there was a good location and close if they didn’t make a profit.

Public schools, on the other hand, are community institutions, like parks and beaches. They should not be closed if they have low scores; they should get help.

In Columbus, Ohio, charter schools are indeed like shoe stores. This year alone, 17 charter schools in that city closed their doors.

Nine of the 17 schools that closed in 2013 lasted only a few months this past fall. When they closed, more than 250 students had to find new schools. The state spent more than $1.6 million in taxpayer money to keep the nine schools open only from August through October or November.

But while 2013 was unusual, closings are not rare. A Dispatch analysis of state data found that 29 percent of Ohio’s charter schools have shut, dating to 1997 when the publicly funded but often privately run schools became legal in Ohio. Nearly 400 currently are operating, about 75 of them in Columbus.

What a waste of taxpayer money. Why would a school open and close in only a few months?

Looking back, some in the charter-school community and at the Ohio Department of Education question whether some of the new schools ever should have opened. How, they wondered, did this happen?

Many point to the sponsors. Nonprofit groups, universities, school districts and educational service centers can act as charter-school sponsors or authorizers. They’re supposed to be the gatekeepers; they decide which schools can open and whether they should close if they’re not adequately serving students.

“The way it works right now is, if a school has a sponsor and they sign a contract, that school can open,” said John Charlton, spokesman for the Ohio Department of Education. “We don’t have any approval or denial power.”

Five of the nine schools that opened and then closed abruptly in the fall were sponsored by the North Central Ohio Educational Service Center, based in Marion and Tiffin. The ESC appears to have lacked a rigorous vetting process.

The ESC, which provides staff members and other types of services to school districts, gave the go-ahead to Andre Tucker to open two Talented Tenth Leadership academies. They opened in August. In October, after the state pointed out serious problems, the ESC forced the schools to close.

It turned out that Tucker had been charged with felony theft and ordered to pay restitution in Florida and had money problems with an earlier charter school.

Gosh, don’t you think someone might have noticed that the guy to whom they were handing over children and public money had a criminal record?

How gullible are taxpayers in Ohio? How long will they remain willing to pay millions of dollars to a charter founder who is best known for campaign contributions? Why does Ohio’s ignore this outrage?

Plunderbund documents the empire created by William Lager, founder of the Electronic Classroom of Tomorrow (ECOT) was paid $1 million in the first year his school opened. It is now the largest charter school in Ohio.

Frankly, it is a sickening story.

Not until 2007 did state officials suggest that Lager should provide detailed invoices for the public money he received.

Writes Plunderbund:

“At this point [2007], according to the official audits released by the Ohio Auditor of State, William Lager had received exactly $28,354,426 over a seven-year period without ever submitting one single invoice documenting the services provided by him or his company.

“Readers, Lager’s fleecing of Ohio’s taxpayers in order to build his personal wealth under the guise of providing an alternative educational option for children is nothing new; he has engaged in a systematic process of pocketing millions of dollars since he founded this public charter school back in 2000 — over 13 years ago. William Lager has been drawing an annual salary of over $1,000,000 since his first year as the CEO of the school’s management company.

“And so we’ll ask again, don’t you think Ohio’s and national newspapers be running front page stories if a public school superintendent in the state of Ohio was drawing an annual salary of over $1,000,000? Why is it that William Lager can receive a six-figure, publicly-funded annual salary without a single article questioning this appalling misappropriation of school funding dollars?”

Why do you think that Ohio news media don’t care about this?